The story below is from our September/October 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
Gladheart Wine & Brews adds artfully roasted coffee to their robust craft beverage line-up.
Courtesy of Gladheart
Knowing that Gladheart Wine & Brews recently added coffee to their beverage line-up, I expected to be met with the aroma of freshly roasted coffee when I walked in. But the beans’ perfume greeted me with more of a whisper than an enveloping hug. Turns out, the roasting room’s door is kept closed at all times so as not to distract customers picking up their favorite double IPA or hoping to discover a new Malbec. But beyond the room’s gleaming glass window, one can see that something special is brewing here. With the addition of its thoughtfully sourced, artfully roasted beans, Gladheart Wine & Brews offers a craft beverage for mornings, too.
Layla KHoury-Hanold
Approachable, thoughtfully sourced coffee beans complement Gladheart’s beverage offerings.
Coffee has been part of co-owners’ Philip Hatter’s and Jayson Anuszkiewicz’s vision for Gladheart from day one. Although the roasting room build was completed last summer, they couldn’t start roasting without proper equipment. Nine months later, their top-of-the-line, three-kilo roaster from Mill City Roasters arrived. It was worth the wait. When the shop started selling coffee the second week of April, it sold 150 bags of beans, five times as much as Hatter had hoped.
Prior to opening Gladheart, Hatter, a Roanoke native and self-styled coffee devotee, earned a BA in studio art from Roanoke College. “I have noticed that in coffee, a lot of creative people work their way into this world. Because there’s a craft—the art of roasting, brewing—it draws a lot of awesome, creative folks,” Hatter says. “The process of taking this product that people have dedicated their lives to around the world and honoring that in what you do is really rewarding.”
Hatter’s decade of coffee industry experience began with a small at-home roasting operation in Roanoke. He then became a barista in 2013 at Froth; when it closed, he traded in his apron for an account manager role with Floyd-based roastery Red Rooster Coffee. “I got to work with them and all their amazing products. I’d drive up and down the I-81 corridor tasting coffees with cafes and training baristas.” In 2017, Hatter placed eighth in the U.S. Coffee Championship’s Brewer’s Cup; shortly after, Hatter and his growing family moved to Tennessee where he worked as director of coffee at Vienna Coffee Company. Throughout his five-year tenure, Hatter says he learned the art of coffee roasting and gained valuable experience travelling to coffee farms in Guatemala and working directly with producers. In 2022, he returned to Roanoke to open Gladheart with Anuszkiewicz in the former Mr. Bill’s Wine Cellar space.
Courtesy of Gladheart
True to Gladheart’s ethos, the bags of thoughtfully sourced beans match the integrity of the wine and beer assortment. Hatter leans on his industry knowledge and relationships with producers and conscientious buyers to source high-quality beans. “I learned this the hard way—you cannot start with a bad quality green coffee and produce a great coffee. You have to start with a green coffee that’s been well-produced,” Hatter says. “I can tell you on most of these bags, down to the farm level where they come from, how they were produced.”
Hatter describes the roasting process as equal parts art and science, so having a background in both realms is vital. “You can’t just do what you feel. These beans react a certain way to heat and to air and you have to know all of that. But you can put your stamp on it in the way you draw different parts of the roast out.” Having an intimate knowledge of the bean’s origin, elevation and terroir is important for understanding each coffee’s complexity, too. As heat is applied to the beans, they change in color from green to yellow to brown, indicating caramelization.
Courtesy of Gladheart
“Hundreds of chemical changes happen inside the bean. That’s where the magic takes place,” Hatter explains. “Then you move in to first crack—it sounds like popcorn popping—that’s the moisture being driven out of the coffee. From the first crack to the second crack you have big acidity, big sugar and then as it progresses you have more of that caramelization, it gets more muted.” Beyond the second crack, one gets the smoky, carbon notes that are signature to a French roast, but don’t showcase the profile of the coffee beans’ origin.
“We typically roast in the light to medium range where you can still taste the origin of the coffee,” Hatter says. “The goal for us is just always a really easy-drinking, balanced cup of coffee. We don’t want intense acidity; we don’t want a lot of bitterness. We want to find a roasting range that really appeals to most people.”
For now, the coffee roasting operation is small. Hatter purchases two to three 150-pound bags per month, as compared to two to three pallets he used to purchase weekly at Red Rooster (that’s eleven 150-pound bags per pallet). Hatter and Anuszkiewicz intentionally choose “crowd-pleaser” coffees, like the best-selling Brazil Fazenda Furnas, a medium roast chockful of rich notes of dried cherry and dark chocolate. Hatter’s personal favorite is Ethiopian Limu, which he lauds for its complexity and lemony acidity. For a smooth sipper that blends the best of both worlds, try Wilderness Road, a blend of Brazilian and Ethiopian beans, which yields a smooth acidity akin to red apples and notes of chocolate and honey.
The roasted beans are packaged in handsome matte black foil bags with a custom logo printed in gold, designed by local artist Alison Hatter (Hatter’s sister-in-law co-owns a studio with his brother). The bags are resealable, so you can opt to get your beans ground to your preferred brewing method: very fine for Turkish coffee or an AeroPress, just past medium coarseness for drip brew and a slightly coarser grind for a French Press or Chemex. Gladheart recently started selling brewed coffee by the cup, too.
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Courtesy of Gladheart
Hatter works with a top-of-the-line, three-kilo roaster from Mill City Roasters.
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Courtesy of Gladheart
Ethiopian Limu is lauded for its complexity and lemony acidity.
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Courtesy of Gladheart
Gladheart’s roasting room occupies its own sealed space within the shop.
As with wine, there can be a sense of intimidation around craft coffee. Hatter laments that in American culture, coffee isn’t treated with the same reverence as elsewhere. “I think a lot of people don’t know what coffee is. It’s a fruit. And it’s a seed from a fruit. And you roast it. And you make it good. We’re just so used to bad coffee,” he says. “I still fight this. Jayson, my business partner and best friend, works in the fire department world. They see what we’re doing as some frou frou, fancy thing and yet when we send them coffee, they push the Folgers and Maxwell House aside.”
True to Gladheart’s ethos, the owners want their coffee to be as approachable as their wine and beer assortment. One way they’ve found success in demystifying wine is with their Friday night tastings, when each week features a different producer, region or style. Hatter envisions Saturday morning coffee tastings and cuppings, which coffee pros use to evaluate the quality, aroma and flavor of several coffees. “Cuppings are just fun—they’re a chance to slurp and be obnoxious for a purpose,” Hatter says.
While a few staple coffees will be on rotation, Hatter is looking forward to adding more beans to the mix. There’s a Columbian variety he’s particularly excited about, as well as one from the Guatemalan Highlands that are touted for their complexity and great acidity. “We’ll introduce more blends around the holidays, and maybe funky unicorn coffees at that time once we’ve built trust with people,” Hatter says. He describes unicorn coffees as “big, crazy coffees,” like what double IPAs are to the beer world. More specifically, they are coffees that either undergo unusual processing—like a carbonic natural processed coffee—or are special varietals, like Geisha, a low-yielding coffee plant that bears fruit with intense flavors.
“Our whole goal of the shop is to be an approachable place,” Hatter says. “So, we’re trying to make it a comfortable place to jump in and enjoy buying and tasting new things.”
The story above is from our September/October 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!